Listen to the conversation in our podcast:
Everything solid and fixed falls apart in Jonathan Safran Foer’s new novel Here I Am, which is published in Kyrre Haugen Bakke’s Norwegian translation this fall. The Jewish American couple Jacob and Julia find that both their relationship and the rituals that they have built their family life around, gradually lose their meaning. In the novel, trivial dialogues are placed side by side with deeply existential questions, and everyone are in one way or another trying to flee from their realities. The older son, Sam, who is getting ready for his Bar Mitzvah, flees into a virtual game world, in which he constructs virtual synagogues before blowing them up.
Then, the unimaginable happens: Israel is attacked, and suffers a devastating defeat in war, and Jacob finds himself in a deep identity crisis, as a husband, a father and a Jew.
Jonathan Safran Foer received high praise for his debut novel, Everything Is Illuminated. The novel Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close followed in 2005, and it has since been made into a film. The non-fiction book Eating Animals came in 2009. Here I Am is his third novel, a revealing and satirical portrait of our time and the intellectual middle class to which he himself belongs. Foer will meet writer and journalist Bjørn Gabrielsen for a conversation.
Tickets English https://www.facebook.com/events/1769180553372899/?fref=ts Jonathan Safran Foer and Bjørn Gabrielsen Litteraturhuset Wergeland https://litteraturhuset.ticketco.no/alle_ting_smuldrer_jonathan_safran_foer_og_bjoern_gabrielsen?locale=en